Well its all been said really. After Sept11th I advised waiting at least a year or so for the dust to settle. I hoped that 18 months on recovery would come with a recovering world economy and a structural growth in LCAs.
It is unfortunate that after the Sept11th effect worked its way through there came along Gulf War2. I now doubt that there will be significant hiring for another 18 months. The world economy simply is not going to pick up for at least that time frame. Structural growth in the form of LCA's is now going to primarily occur on the Continent. Which has a wealth of pilots looking for work e.g. easyJet opens a 7 aircraft base at Paris Orly where 400 Air Lib pilots were recently made redundant - guess where the pilots will come from.
In addition. History suggests that in the current market condition there is a reasonable chance of an existing major airline in the UK going bust.
Meanwhile the schools have been pretty much as full as they were in the golden years of 1998, 1999, 2000. Churning out something like 800 freshly minted CPL IR holders with low time a year. This stagnant pool of labour must now stand at about 1,500 deep.
Many will never earn their livings as pilots. Indeed I know a great many who have simply written off the massive expenditure and pursued other careers. Often with a sense of relief to leave the whole bloody struggle behind them. A sense of wasted money, wasted effort and pubic failure proving a bitter legacy of following their dream.
I *do* know of people who have trained in the face of Sept11th and have got Boeing and Airbus jobs. It gave me immense pleasure to hear this week in Alicante the voice of a student I knew in Jerez calling for taxi clearance in his Boeing.
Its tempting to latch onto these success stories. Eveyone seems to know someone who knew someone who just got a great job. That piece of gossip naturally gets churned around endlessly. What people tend not to gossip about is all the people they know about who didn't get an interview last week.
Against this backdrop I cannot advise entering training right now.
A PPL and some hour building plus enrolling on a distance learning ATPL course might be reasonable. I would not leave employment to do any of this.
Even if things pick up nicely in 18 months time. Its going to take 3 years just to drain the pool that already exists through recruitment and people leaving for pastures new. I guess this leads me to believe that it will be in the order of 5 years before things turn sunny in the airline recruitment market.
Which puts us at about 1990 in the context of the last airline recession.
Comparions with "last time" are always fraught. It is my recollection that people who entered training in 1995 and graduated in 1996 managed to enter the market at the start of the upswing. 1996 and 1997 saw a lot of movement in the market. People were suddenly getting jobs. As a result people flooded into the schools and by 1998 and 1999 the schools were churning out students at a heck of a rate but lots were still getting hired albeit with lots of competition.
The good time continued to roll into 2000 and 2001.
This time of course there are differing factors in play. Not least the fact of the JAA and the free movement of pilot labour between EU countries.
Combine new uncertainties with the variables of personal circumstances and there is no right advice or right decision to make. Its essentially a gamble in which luck plays no small part.
Good luck,
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